Choose the right words for your audience

It seems like such an elementary idea, but I’m amazed at the number of people who don’t seem to know it: You should choose the right words for your audience. For example, if you want to talk about photography, you can use a very specialized vocabulary when you’re talking to professional photographers. You can use terms like shutter speed, abberation, hot shoe, and vignetting, and they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about.

People who specialize in certain knowledge domains—like photography, neurosurgery, military history, and even hobbies like stamp collecting or snowboarding—develop a collection of words, a lexicon, as a sort of verbal shorthand. It’s a way of compressing information. But as Kathy Sierra points out, there’s a difference between a specialized lexicon and buzzwords:

Domain-specific terms compress information, while buzzwords often masquerade as information.

Buzzwords are often (not always) semantically empty while specialized domain lexicons are semantically dense.

Domain-specific terms are usually associated with passion, or at least expertise, while buzzwords are often associated with those who might be faking expertise, or who are using them simply to impress others.

Some terms have, through overuse and misuse, moved from being part of a specialized lexicon to being empty buzzwords. Let’s not contribute to that.